There’s Gold in These Twitter Tactics for Sales

For business-to-business connections, LinkedIn is your best channel. But when your InMails are credited back with no new connections or messages to speak of, it’s time to try other avenues.

Head back to that prospect and click on their Contact tab for their Twitter contact. A Twitter handle is just as good as an email address or even a phone number these days. Engaging on Twitter might make you have to share your favorite yogurt flavor of coffee creation, but if it gains you a warm prospect… how do you like your latte?

If you’re game to try Twitter to get familiar and ultimately connect with a prospect, here are some helpful Twitter Tactics to try:

Follow your prospect. Copy the prospect’s Twitter handle from their LinkedIn profile (or wherever else they’ve listed it publicly), paste it into the Search field on Twitter, find them and click on Follow.

Favorite your prospect’s tweets (appropriately). This is just like clicking “like” on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Retweet them (RT). If they tweet something you agree with and would like to share to your own Twitter audience, click the Retweet button OR (even better!) copy their handle and tweet content, paste it into a new Tweet, then add your own brief thought at the front. What does this do? It gives them more visibility, thus you’re doing them a service by adding to their branding tactics.

Mention them in your own tweet (@). You can type up your own original thought, and mention the prospect via Twitter handle. This communicates that you take enough interest in their Twitter timeline to tie them to one of your tweets.

If your prospect follows you back after any of these tactics, you’re in! You can now send a Direct Message (D) to your Twitter prospect, using your stellar sales tactics within the 140 character limit Twitter provides.

If you haven’t been followed back after trying 1-5, keep at it. You can also try a more targeted tweet where you mention your prospect with a specific message, such as

“@UserABC, seems like you’re doing great in BusinessXYZ. Pretty tough in this economy; great job!”

Also, share! What tactics have you tried when one social media avenue doesn’t work?

LI Positions Itself as an Up-And-Coming Publishing Hub

If you’re not on LinkedIn… You know what? Let’s take care of that right now. Click with me to LinkedIn.com and use this handy walk-through to get on board. You want to do this now, especially if you classify yourself as remotely business-related.

Linked In icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Assuming you are now on LinkedIn or intend to be so very soon, it appears now is an excellent time to wade in if you aren’t already swimming. As of a year ago, LinkedIn’s user stats had jumped by 45% worldwide with a total of 147 million users in January 2012 (see this helpful presentation on SlideShare.net for a great breakdown). That statistic had grown to over 200 million members across 200 countries and territories by the end of 2012 (About LinkedIn).

But the growth isn’t the sole reason to succumb to the pull of this professional network. Even if LinkedIn didn’t include executives from all of the 2012 Fortune 500 companies as members, its niche as a professional must-have will take deeper root through its intent to become aprofessional publishing hub.

Come again? You read that right. If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, you’ve noticed some newer features allowing you not just to connect to your own contacts but to follow “Influencers” in professional circles: benefiting from their content and sharing it out yourself to add credibility andvisibility to your own profile. Really, isn’t that what networking is all about?

These Influencers are posting relevant and timely content at a consistent rate, which can be a boon to small business owners or entrepreneurs who need to market themselves while simultaneously gleaning knowledge from and sharing content with their networks. With 9.8 billion page views, excluding mobile, in Q4 2012, that’s quite a potential network. And we’ll ask you again: are you onLinkedIn yet? See first paragraph.